If you are like me, you don’t have enough time or money to donate to all of the charities that you would like to. Fortunately, I have found some ways to make charitable contributions without really doing much at all. I’m going to tell you three ways that you can make a positive difference while doing things you might already be doing.

AmazonSmile

If you shop on Amazon.com, there is a really easy way you can donate to your favorite charity when you shop from the online retailer. To start donating, you log in into your Amazon.com account and go to smile.amazon.com. Then you select the charity you would like to donate to.

When you are ready to shop on Amazon, make sure you go to smile.amazon.com and Amazon will remember which charity you have chosen. It’s great because on the top of the screen you can see which charity you are supporting and how much money you have raised for that charity.

So far I’ve raised a little over $41 for my charity, which isn’t a ton of money, but it’s money that they would not have had otherwise, and it was donated just because I purchased some items that I was going to purchase anyway. Not every item is eligible AmazonSmile, but according to Amazon, tens of millions of products are eligible and you can check an item’s product detail to see if it’s eligible.

For every eligible purchase, Amazon will donate 0.5 percent of the price to your charity. You can also change your charity anytime. According to Amazon, there are nearly 1 million eligible non-profit charities to choose from. Environmentally oriented charities on AmazonSmile include the World Wildlife Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club Foundation, just to name a few.

Kroger Community Rewards

To use Kroger Community Rewards, go online to bit.ly/KrogerAccount to make a Kroger online account. Then you can click on “Community” and then “Kroger Community Rewards.” Finally, click on “Enroll Now.”

Once you fill out your address, you can pick your organization. Then every time you use your Kroger card, you will be donating to the organization you chose. The organizations you can pick from include churches and schools.

Though I couldn’t find out exactly how much Kroger donates, every little bit helps. And I also found out that you have to re-enroll your card every year.

Ecosia

I search for things online many times a day. Whether I’m looking for a recipe or the current weather, there isn’t much that cannot be found with a quick online search.

Wouldn’t it be great if with all of the web searching we do, we could also do something good?

According to Ecosia, they use at least 80 percent of the monthly profits from their online search engine to plant trees in “Burkina Faso, Madagascar, Peru, Indonesia and Tanzania.”

They get money from selling ads on their web searches, just like many other search engines. They say even if you don’t ever click on an ad, that just by being a user you are still contributing to the movement and it’s more relevant to advertisers when there are more people using it.

I’ve tried it and it’s really good — I’d say just as good as the other search engine that I had been using. So why not get some trees planted while you are trying to figure out who that actor is in that one movie or where the best place to go on a vacation is? You can start using their search engine at ecosia.org and they even have a chrome extension which makes it even easier for me to use.

According to Ecosia, they plant a tree for about every 45 searches and they keep track of your searches for you in the top right corner so you can see how much you are helping to contribute.

Everyone is busy these days, but these three easy things make it much easier to donate and help the planet, even if it’s just a little bit at a time.

Amanda’s Animal Fact of the Week

Opossums are the only marsupials native to the United States and Canada.